I can’t believe that 2014 is done. It has been one hell of a year; I got married, started teaching, and really started taking my career seriously. Each one of these are worth going into in great depth… but I won’t.

Jodorowskys Dune is a new documentary by Frank Pavich about the singular vision, of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, to make Dune into a film. From the trailer the visuals for the 1975 movie would have been breathtaking. This looks like an amazing story. Opens today in select theaters in NY and LA.

When I was in high-school I longed to be sophisticated in the way that all pubescent boys longed to be sophisticated – looking sophisticated to girls. Back in high-school my tools of appearing sophisticated ranged from:

Reading Thoreau’s Walden to look independent and well read, because it was mentioned once on My-So-Called-Life, but hating every page.

Listening to the Pixies which said “here’s a guy who’s part of the counter culture”, when all I wanted to do was listen to Paula Abdul.

Writing for the literary magazine, because I had things to say.

Dying my hair blue, because here’s a guy who looks like a dork, but is inside a punk rocker.

Writing angsty, understanding to feminist ideals, poetry.

In short I was a complete poser. I was trying to please everyone else, because I never truly felt at home in my own skin. I thought what I liked was stupid and so I co-opted the popular alternative lifestyle of the time. Something akin to Jordan Catalano meets Tribe Called Quest frontman Q-Tip. The unfortunate truth is, these two personalities were both completely unconvincing on me. I was that dork who didn’t want to be a dork.

These days, that may be difficult for modern-day dorks to understand, but before the popular culture accepted dorks, they mercilessly hunted us down and mocked us. We were the awkward trailblazers that eventually grew up to run every major corporation and conglomerate. Turned out, while being awkward wasn’t, being smart was pretty cool.

So when unpacking a box of things I had stored before going away to college, I was greeted with a familiar smell – Drakkar Noir. The little black bottle had been sophisticatedly stewing for 17 years awaiting it’s triumphant return to the teenager it had once defined. True to its tough and rugged scent, nothing had changed with the black matte bottle. 17 years and… nothing had changed. It smelled exactly the same as it I remembered.

It, unlike my younger self, was so blindly sure of itself – it remained the same, impenetrable to the years. It was an instant reminder of all my missteps. Hell, it was an instant reminder of the missteps of a generation of pimple-faced boys who simply wanted to be loved and thought a new smell might just be the ticket. So, to all the (now) men who once nervously visited a drug store and had an employee open a glass case to purchase a bottle of Drakkar Noir, instead of condoms, I raise my glass of Malbec* and solute you. All us dorks salute you – smelling all the sweeter.

*It is actually Pinot Noir, but the similarity was too much, even for a blog post.